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Theodor Geisel, “Dr Seuss”, was an interesting man. Most of his bestselling children’s books — The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, etc — were written in the Fifties. In October 1967, his wife of 40 years, Helen, committed suicide, partly because of her husband’s affair with the woman, Audrey Dimond, whom he went on to marry, in June 1968.

Seuss subsequently suffered writer’s block, until in 1970 the couple took a holiday to Africa. It was after watching elephants in the Serengeti that Seuss was inspired to write The Lorax, completing 90 per cent of it in a single afternoon on the only paper to hand, a laundry list.

It’s a vivid nonsense poem with a sombre ecological message, in his usual bouncy anapestic tetrameter, full of invented words and names, all of which have their own logic in the nonsense world. It’s also, as always, brilliantly illustrated by Seuss, in his flowing, whirly way, with a powerful shift in the colour palette towards dark greys, blues and maroons as the story progresses.

In the first two illustrations, an unnamed boy, standing in for “you”, the reader, is seen approaching the Once-ler, lurking in his Lerkim — and then the Once-ler begins his tale, of how long ago he chopped down the Truffula trees to make Thneeds out of their tuft.

The Lorax, a brownish, shortish, oldish, sharpish creature who speaks for the trees, materialised to remonstrate with the Once-ler but he went right ahead and destroyed every last one. Before disappearing, the Lorax left a pile of rocks bearing the word: UNLESS. The Once-ler now realises its meaning: “Now that you’re here,/ the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear./ UNLESS someone like you/ cares a whole awful lot,/ nothing is going to get better./ It’s not.” And he lets drop the very last Truffula seed, commanding you: plant it.

And that’s that, a perfect little work of art, needing no adaptation than that of parents reading it aloud and showing it to their children (Dr Seuss had none himself, incidentally). But here it has been adapted anyway by the team who made the enjoyable 3D animation Despicable Me.

It stinks. Very early in my notes, I see I wrote, “very over-emphatic, over-postured”. Then, “an annoyingness contest”.

Where to begin? Because only a few lines of verse are retained, none of the nonsense element retains its raison d’être. You wonder, pointlessly, what a Thneed is and why it is called that, whereas the poem has its own logic. Likewise, Dr Seuss’s non-naturalistic drawings work as a fine prompt to the imagination but here, where all details are filled in, the very artificiality of the Truffula trees — they resemble brightly coloured candyfloss — negates the supposed point that these are real, natural trees that need to be nurtured again.

Then the plot has been horribly filled out, with the story of a 12-year-old boy, Ted, who lives in a wholly artificial town run by a villain, O’Hare (who looks a bit like Jonathan Ross), who sells bottled fresh air. Ted sets off to get a real tree to win a kiss from the girl he has a crush on, Audrey (who looks a bit like Rebekah Brooks). When Ted gets the seed, there is, you bet, a protracted chase sequence as O’Hare and his henchmen try to confiscate it. There are also some punishing song and dance sequences (“everybody needs a Thneed” being trumped in horror by “let it grow”). Voicing Ted, Zac Efron shouts too much and even Danny DeVito can’t make the Lorax (who looks a bit like Rhodes Boyson) anything other than irritating.

As Ted’s spunky grandma, the veteran Betty White is great, and the 3D is bright and effective. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with it but imaginatively it is dead. The message here is to conserve and value nature but this big Hollywood production could not itself be more artificial, corporate and superfluous. It might look like fun but, believe me, it ain’t. If you cherish Dr Seuss, steer clear. Don’t tell the kids about it at all, maybe?